Is Transgender Surgery the Solution? Wendy Summers Speaks

An award winning transgender porn star Wendy Summers claims: By trade she is a data analyst, an adult performer and a philosopher.

While she is scarcely lives a normal life, it’s a well-adjusted and damn good one! So when Wendy Summers read an article by Dr. McHugh she got the heebie-jeebies. She has no doubt he is sincere in his point of view. But for as sincere as he is, he is also misguided.

Dr. McHugh builds his statement on a basement of sand: he claims that ‘sex misalignment…doesn’t correspond with physical reality’ and ‘that it can bring to grim psychological outcomes.’ Wendy Summers offers to look at his first statement: ‘sex misalignment doesn’t correspond with physical reality.’ McHugh states that people live in a world of the gender binary. As the classic movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger called ‘Kindergarten Cop’ says: ‘Boys have a penis, and girls have a vagina.’

Dr. McHugh builds his statement on a basement of sand: he claims that ‘sex misalignment…doesn’t correspond with physical reality’ and ‘that it can bring to grim psychological outcomes.’ Wendy Summers offers ...

But that’s not the entire story. Nowadays it’s acknowledged that one in thousand births, a child is born with an intersex condition – their genitals are ‘indeterminate’. Not quite a vagina and not quite a penis and usually it comes with a host of other medical issues. Wendy Summers raises this not to equate transsexuality to intersexuality – they are distinct conditions – but rather to raise the point that nature itself doesn’t seem to want to paint an ideally clean line between the genders. How frequently do secondary sexual features of girls occur in guys and vice versa? Binary gender isn’t biological fact, but rather a fact pointing at social construct.

As for Dr. McHugh’s second argument: that gender reassignment ‘can bring to grim psychological outcomes’, Wendy Summers suggests to be clear: transgendered people who commit suicide after Gender Reassignment Surgery aren’t doing it because they wanted they still had their birth genitals back. This surgery can help some transsexual persons find peace with their bodies, but it doesn’t help them find a work or overcome prejudices of those people around them. There is an explanation why the medical consensus is to take Gender Reassignment Surgery – it is the best treatment way available.

What scares Wendy Summersis the alternative which Dr. McHugh suggests is long discredited theory: conversion therapy. This points at what the core of this struggle is truly over. Dr. McHugh tries to spin a narrative which rejects that transsexual rights is just another skirmish in the long running fight against the social construct of the gender binary. This civil rights progression started with the rise of feminism and women’s rights to the homosexual and lesbian fights since Stonewall to the modern growing support for transsexual rights. It’s saying that discussion therapy and all the same old statements are being trotted out again for this horse and pony show.

Dr. McHugh invokes Summers’ personal favorite: think of the kids! He insinuates the transsexual rights movement has scalpels at the ready and we’re prepared to neuter the kids of tomorrow. Wendy Summers can’t think of credible transsexual rights advocate who would offer any kind of irreversible treatment for kids. Her recommendation is a safe, nurturing environment where the kid can investigate and find out who they are so when they are adult enough they can make their own decisions regarding surgeries. Dr. McHugh wants to say it’s a mental disease within transgendered people which makes them different and leads to the stress transsexuals feel; he is misguided. The stress transsexual people face isn’t because they are deficient, but rather because society is deficient.

Wendy Summers suggests imagining the world without gender. Where an individual is measured by the limits of their actions, the brilliance of their thoughts and the compassion in their heart. In this world, the concept of transsexuality wouldn’t exist – all transgendered people would simply be…just like every other human being. But since they built their world’s social order with the binary gender concept ingrained throughout their institutions, you’ll have to understand that those of them who don’t fit perfectly in those boxes are going to have a hard time making the system work as it’s needed.

Wendy Summers says it’s stressful when you can be fired for simply being a transsexual, lonely when family members hate you because you’re different, and dangerous when mates advocate violence against you. One final, more personal thought is that she has struggled against anorexia. During puberty at the age of 12, Wendy Summers developed breasts. Despite being obviously underweight, both her parents and her doctor told her she was fat – that brought to a lifelong fight with Wendy’s body image regarding weight. Anorexia isn’t transsexuality. One she will struggle to her dying breath to no succumb to it. The other Wendy Summers will embrace wholeheartedly. Those are the healthy decisions to make.